The Inner Quarters:
Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period

Patricia Buckley Ebrey

In China the Sung period (960 to 1279) saw "the spread of footbinding and
strong condemnation of remarriage by widows", but was also a period when
"women had particularly strong property rights". Our sources for the
lives of Sung women are mostly anecdotal narratives, with a distinct
class and gender bias: pretty much everything was written by scholarly
men, with funerary biographies of upper class women emphasizing positive
aspects and legal cases involving poorer women negative ones. From these
sources, however, Patricia Buckley Ebrey teases a fascinating portrait
of the lives of women in Sung China, focused on marriage; she also uses
halftones of art works to good effect.

Confucianism stressed physical separation of the sexes; accompanying this
was an ideological distinction between inner and outer, ying and yang.
Male and female body images and clothing were clearly distinct (an extreme
example, footbinding spread from the palace and the entertainment quarters
to the elite).

We know most about upper class marriages: Ebrey describes their language
and terminology and the legal frameworks, Confucian ethics and ritual,
and literary and popular images (such as notions of predestination)
surrounding them. Selection of partners involved friends, relatives,
go-betweens, and young men and women with "minds of their own". The most
important ceremonies and rituals involved multiple exchanges of gifts,
first during the betrothal process and then again during the wedding.
Common components of dowries were land, cash, cloth, and jewelry and
control of dowries was critical in family politics. There were changes
during the period, but "within the long course of Chinese history, the
Sung seems to have been the period in which wives and daughters fared
best with regard to dowries".

Ideal upper-class wives were "inner helpers", holding together complex
extended families, managing households, giving sage advice, producing
literary works, and piously performing religious rituals. The details
varied, but making cloth — splicing and spinning, raising silkworms
and reeling silk, weaving and dying — was a key part of women's work.
Relations between husbands and wives involved more than "willing
submission" — they were also represented as loving and companionate,
alongside stereotypes of bossy or jealous wives and violent or smitten
husbands. Women's identities revolved around others, particularly around
children and their moral development; wet nurses were common but a matter
for concern, and abortion and infanticide were condemned.

There were more fundamental threats to ideal marriage. Neo-Confucian
ideology praised chaste widows, but remarriage was always legal —
either way, widowed women were likely to face property lawsuits from
relatives of their deceased husband. Concubines were little more than
sex slaves, with few rights or protections — they could have children
taken away from them and their children had to ritually honour their
father's wife. The importance of maintaining lineages created a place
for adoptions and uxorilocal marriages (where daughters were kept at
home), though this was perhaps more common in frontier and non-Han areas.
And women usually came off the worst from "adultery, incest, and divorce"
— judges might, for example, expel a daughter-in-law rather than chastise
her father-in-law for treating her indecently.

Contemporaries wrote from an intellectual perspective that denied change,
but Ebrey concludes with an outline of changes during the Sung period
— in women's economic life, in the gender rhetoric associated with
Neo-Confucianism, and in marriage practices. She argues that status
consciousness and the dynamics of class inequalities were important
driving forces of change. And Sung Neo-Confucianism was not misogynist,
just focused on patrilineal principles.